Over a period of twenty years, the British government poured more than £130,000 into Georgia, supplemented by church and private donations, including over £90,000 from one of the trustees. Such massive subsidies made it unnecessary for the settlers in Georgia to pay taxes, and therefore made it unnecessary to have any representative local government to raise taxes — thereby eliminating the need for institutions which could have provided political feedback modifying the distant trustees’ plans. The sum spent by the British government was more than it had ever spent on any other nonmilitary project. Meanwhile, the beneficiaries of all this largesse were
NON-ECONOMIC RATIONALES
There are moral and political, as well as economic, reasons for preferring governmental direction of the economy (“planning”) to decentralized price coordination (“capitalism”). Perhaps the most common reason for preferring “planning” in general and socialist “planning” in particular is a sense of the moral inadequacy of capitalism — either (1) outright “exploitation” of one group by another, domestically or internationally, or (2) a selfish, every-man-for-himself amorality, or (3) a “meritocracy” which ignores our common cultural inheritance and our common humanity. More narrowly economic reasons for preferring governmental direction to decentralized price coordination include the possibility of internalizing external costs, taking a longer-run view of the consequences of economic decision making and eliminating monopolistic practices which reduce the efficiency of a price-coordinated economy. Politically, one of the major objections to the price-coordination systems of Western society as they have emerged historically is their inequality in wealth and power among people and organizations, and the distortions which this inequality introduces into both political and economic processes.
Capitalist middlemen are often depicted as “mere interceptors and parasites”136 and profit as simply “overcharge.”137 While episodic interception of goods on their way from producer to consumer might seem plausible, the